Get Off of My Cloud: Private Cloud Computing Takes Shape

Get Off of My Cloud: Private Cloud Computing Takes Shape

Cloud computing, still in its infancy but growing steadily as a
major player in midmarket enterprise IT, is already starting to branch
off into more custom-designed configurations.

Cloud, or utility,
computing serves up computing power, data storage or applications from
one data center location over a grid to thousands or millions of users
on a subscription basis. This general kind of cloud -- for example,
services provided online by Amazon EC2, Google Apps, and Salesforce.com
-- is known as a "public" cloud, because any business or individual can
subscribe.

Private cloud computing is a different take on the mainstream version,
in that smaller, cloudlike IT systems within a firewall offer similar
services, but to a closed internal network. This network may include
corporate or division offices, other companies that are also business
partners, raw-material suppliers, resellers, production-chain entities
and other organizations intimately connected with a corporate
mothership.

Obviously, security is much tighter in a private cloud, simply due to
its exclusive nature. And security is Reason No. 1 that an enterprise,
if sold on the cloud computing concept to begin with, will consider
constructing its own private cloud formation.

How Dell approaches private cloud structures

Paul Bell, president of Dell Americas, told eWEEK Nov. 4 at a
roundtable discussion at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco
that private cloud computing is indeed on the company's agenda and that
it is a trend in which customers are beginning to invest.

"This [private cloud enterprise] is definitely on our radar. We work
with partners like Rackspace, which has been supporting smaller
businesses, trying to leverage hosting that way. We are also seeing a
growing number of customers trying to built it [their own cloud
systems] themselves," Bell said.

As a mainstream supplier of the hardware to put these things together, Dell is coming at this in several ways, Bell said.

"One situation is where we may have a joint [private cloud computing]
project with Citrix or VMware -- I think right now we're doing about a
third of VMware's [hardware] business -- in the server virtualization
market," Bell said.

"Increasingly, our customers are working on technologies such as VDI
[virtual desktop infrastructure]," Bell said. "This allows them to do
client virtualization. The reality is, there are multiple means to the
end state today."

VDI is a server-centric computing model that borrows from the
traditional thin-client model but is designed to give system
administrators and end users the best of both worlds: the ability to
host and centrally manage desktop virtual machines in the data center
while giving end users a full PC desktop experience.

"This reminds us an awful lot of where server virtualization was about
three or four years ago. People were testing it, thinking about it, but
it really wasn't out of production at that time. Now it's gone
massively into the mainstream at a very rapid pace," Bell said.

VDI for use in private cloud computing appears to be headed in the same
direction. However, the different client virtualization technologies
that are available "are still in kind of a fragmented state," Bell said.

"There are many ways to do it. So we're in a process right now of
scaling out our consulting capability ... to help customers decide upon
how they would do that cloud," Bell said. "There are a lot of issues,
starting with, 'What is the server backend?' to networking issues to
'What kind of device the client ought to be interfacing with?', and so
on.

"No question that for security reasons, this [private cloud computing] is a very strong trend for our customers."

Private Storage Clouds All About Control

Storage Networks and SANRISE (acquired by Hitachi) were two early
on-demand storage companies, among others, that got upended in the
2000-2003 bubble.

"These were about setting up storage structures at places like
[Internet service provider] Exodus," Sajai Krishnan, CEO of cloud
storage software startup ParaScale and a storage industry veteran, told me. "Typically, they provided
big EMC-type storage and sliced it up to offer to enterprise-type
customers. That was the 'Gen 1' of cloud storage."

It didn't work because "nobody wanted to buy Tier 1 data storage in
this kind of 'cloud' context, although it wasn't called 'cloud' back
then," Krishnan said.

On the business side, companies such as Nirvanix, Cleversafe and ParaScale (which is still in beta testing), have staked out their territories and are becoming the de
facto, go-to folks for Web 2.0 companies looking to build out their own
private clouds.

"The reasons to build a private cloud are very simple: They're all
about control and security," Krishnan said. "'I want it within my
firewall; I want my people to manage it."

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) online storage service is a very
well-engineered service, Krishnan said, but "it operates at such a
scale where sometimes you have these hiccups," he said. "If you're in
S3's IT shop, you have no way of actually solving that problem in any
manageable time frame. And if you were to own your own cloud, you know
exactly what's going on.

"You know which software revs you have rolled out, you know which
servers are choking up -- all of this is possible when you know your
constraints," Krishnan said.

When does it make sense for an enterprise IT shop to think about building its own cloud?

"I believe that if you have 20 to 30 terabytes of data growing at about
10 to 20 TBs per year, then you should think about having your own
cloud," Krishnan said. "That's about a minimum level. If you're much
smaller than that, and your growth is not much more than that, there
are plenty of appliances you can buy with 12 and 24TB of capacity that
will work just fine."

Software for Cloud Storage: Not Easy to Do Well

"It's hard to do the software for these storage clouds," Henry
Baltazar, storage analyst for The 451 Group, told me. "There's two
parts to it: The first part is the front end, the application. The
thing that's host-facing: How do you manage it? How do you provision
it?

"The back end is the nuts-and-bolts part. How do you scale the thing
out? How do you have enough buckets for all the storage? That's where
you'll see that the new [second-generation cloud] companies like
ParaScale, Nirvanex and Cleversafe know how to do this well," Baltazar
said.

High-performance, dedicated storage systems are typically used in
government laboratories, such as Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Los
Alamos, which require high scalability and ultra-high throughput
performance for high-end scientific computing projects. In a way, they
resemble custom-designed cloud systems, but "they're really more like
big machines," Baltazar said.

However, the newer companies noted above are providing infrastructure
for unstructured data that doesn't need particularly fast I/O access.
This business data doesn't need high security and simply needs to be a
safely accessible place; small, starter-type clouds -- namely, those
consisting of two to five servers -- can cost in the $10,000-$15,000
price range and are well within the budget limits of many mid-size
businesses.

"The ParaScale model is designed to scale up inexpensively for a lot of
backup and archiving uses, for that content that won't be needed too
often. It's been said that 70 percent of stored data is never touched
again," Baltazar said. "That's what you want to put in a storage cloud."

Private clouds are a viable way to save business data in view of the recently amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,
which require businesses that keep digital data to have a systematic
process by which they can show the court, in the event of litigation,
that it is keeping it organized and available for at least three years.

What does the future portend for private clouds?

"It looks good," Baltazar said. "There's plenty of room for this business model to work well.

"There's tons of content, especially in the consumer space, that's
being created every day, whether it's video, photos, office documents
-- that is not in Exchange servers, SQL servers, or Oracle servers. You
don't need to have high I/O for this, you just need to get to it."